


Ready to Comply

by lucymonster



Series: People Change (Memories Don't) [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Gen, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 03:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6886828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Do you remember me?" Steve asks.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>The Winter Soldier looks him up and down. "I only remember shit when it's important."</i>
</p><p>Steve needs to believe that Bucky can be redeemed. If the only way to help him is to face his alter ego head on, then so be it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ready to Comply

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to yeahcoolduck and ladylapislazuli for the beta!

“Do you know me?” Steve asks.

He’s standing outside a containment cell deep beneath the well-lit halls of T’Challa’s jungle compound. The Wakandans have gone to some lengths to make the cell look as little like a cell as possible: the walls are painted a tranquil blue, and the furniture is comfortable and stylish if you ignore the thick metal bolts attaching it to the floor. An attractive selection of magazines and paperbacks have been laid out on the coffee table. There is even a privacy curtain around the toilet and shower, though the gesture is a symbolic one – every square inch of the cell is covered by surveillance cameras.

In the middle of the room, sitting on the bed with a thick vibranium collar around his neck, is the man who, a few short hours ago, used to be Steve’s best friend.

After countless briefings and debates and discussion with the doctors, Steve knows the plan inside out. Secure inside this compound, with his programming activated by Hydra’s code phrase and wearing a collar set to take him down with a fast-acting paralytic at the first sign of trouble, the Winter Soldier will be guided through an intensive reconditioning course devised by a Wakandan team of psychiatric experts. If it works – and the degree of ‘if’ is still up in the air – the Winter Soldier will be trained out of his explosive violence and Bucky’s brainwashed episodes will be downgraded from a life-threatening catastrophe to a manageable inconvenience. And if the plan doesn’t work, the collar around Bucky’s neck will stop any violent outbursts in their tracks.

Knowing the plan is one thing. Seeing it in action, about five feet away behind a fortified glass containment wall, is another.

Steve expected … he doesn’t know what he expected. He’s been over General Karpov’s notes so many times that they’re starting to blur together. Karpov wrote about the Winter Soldier with an affected sort of scientific detachment, veering only very occasionally into a more humanising banality.  _ The Soldier’s combat performance is improving for repeat exposure to Compound Alpha Zero, _ reads one page.  _ Marked adrenal response, improvements in aggression and focus. Recommend the trials continue _ . And then, on the next page:  _ The Soldier refuses to eat cook’s famous sauerkraut stew. Had him served sausages and they were more to his liking. _

The Soldier hasn’t taken his eyes off Steve since he stepped up to the glass. His gaze is cool, challenging, and everything about his posture screams dominance in a way Steve finds hard to reconcile with the obedient puppet of General Karpov’s medical trials. The Winter Soldier looks like exactly the kind of man who would refuse to eat cook’s famous sauerkraut stew.

“Soldat?” Steve prompts. They’re going with the Russian codename. It’s easier than trying to call him anything else, but it tastes sick and sour on Steve’s tongue.

The Soldier also isn’t much of a talker. That much Steve has surmised from watching the doctors debrief him this morning after they triggered his programming. He answers direct questions, but only if they come from an authority figure; he has no interest in any of the nurses and orderlies overseeing his care. He doesn’t seem to have realised that he’s no longer in Hydra custody, and the doctors only plan to clue him in if he asks directly. So far the Soldier hasn’t shown any inclination to curiosity.

He must still be working out Steve’s position in the lab hierarchy, because he doesn’t ignore the question outright. He looks Steve up and down, coolly assessing, and Steve feels a swoop of nausea in his gut. It doesn’t matter what the Soldier looks like, or who he was a few minutes ago. Those eyes aren’t Bucky’s.

“No,” the Soldier says.

So far everything is going to plan. The therapy T’Challa’s doctors have devised relies on the Soldier staying in his brainwashed state for the duration, and they want to avoid any memory triggers that may motivate him to fight back against his programming. They were hesitant to let Steve make direct contact with the Soldier at all, but Steve put his foot down. “Last time I saw the Winter Soldier,” he told them, “he crashed his own chopper trying to cut me in half. I don’t think he’s going to remember me just because I show up outside his cell. It takes a bit more pushing than that.”

Maybe it would have been a better idea to keep his distance and leave the Soldier in the doctors’ care. Bucky certainly thought so, before they triggered him again. But it’s too late now. Steve has made his decision and the Soldier is watching him, motionless and expectant.

He swallows his nausea. “I’m a friend,” he says, “and I’m going to be visiting you every day while you’re down here. We’ve worked together before, but I know you don’t remember it.”

The Soldier looks Steve up and down, then raises a brow and looks away. Apparently this answers his hierarchy question. “I only remember shit when it’s important,” he says, and picks up a magazine from the coffee table.

-

The waiting room above the lab feels empty and unused, but the newspapers are up to date.

_ STARK TRUTH: THE CONSPIRACY THAT BROUGHT DOWN AN AMERICAN HERO _ , the headline blares. The general public is not supposed to know about what happened in Siberia, but enough of it has leaked. Everyone seems to know that Tony’s parents were assassinated and that the Winter Soldier was behind it. The article catalogues Howard’s well-publicised efforts to recreate the super-soldier serum. The prevailing theory is that the growing success of his experiments was a threat to Hydra, and they wanted him out of the game before he could complete his work.

Nobody knows about the other five soldiers who were kept at the Siberian base. The JCTC has kept that intel, at least, under tight lock and key.

In one of the weekly supplements, some enterprising journalist has assembled a collage on Howard Stark the lovable family man: arm in arm with his smiling wife on a riverbank; holding up a plump-cheeked baby in front of a crowd of reporters; working under the bonnet of a car while his prepubescent son looks on in wonder. The accompanying story includes a heart-warming, intimately personal account of the time Howard took Maria and Tony with him to a conference at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

Steve tosses the paper aside. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how the writers are getting their access. Tony has always known how to work the spotlight; talking to journalists is probably easier than talking to a therapist. It’s only natural that he wants to tell his story.

But it’s a shame the media is such a mess at the moment. The way things are going, Steve may be spending a lot of time over the next few weeks casting around for easy distractions.

He glances at his phone on the table beside him. Sam flew out with T’Challa’s private chopper this morning, back to the capital. With the Winter Soldier secure and cooperative in his cell, there was no reason for either of them to wait around and watch. Strictly speaking, Steve’s presence isn’t needed either. But where else is he going to go? After the fiasco with the Accords, the world doesn’t need Captain America anymore. And it’s Steve who talked Bucky into doing this. The Winter Soldier is his responsibility. If anything goes wrong with the treatment, Steve needs to be on hand to deal with it.

Sam is probably on a flight back to the US right now. Steve can’t regret not going with him.

The doctors have worked out a strict regime, to be observed by all personnel over the next few weeks. Every day at nine am, after a nourishing breakfast and an hour of heavily supervised gym time, the Winter Soldier will be taken to the lab for a set of scans and work-ups. At ten am he will move to a fortified interrogation room where he will sit down with attending psychiatrist Dr Medvedev for a three-hour interview session before breaking for lunch at one pm on the dot. Predictability, the doctors say, is the cornerstone of the entire process. The Winter Soldier needs to know his schedule, know exactly what to expect from his carers every minute of every day; only when he feels secure will he start to relax and engage meaningfully with the programme.

Nobody seems exactly sure what ‘meaningful engagement’ will look like. So far all they’re getting from the Soldier is unquestioning obedience – a relief for the people who have to work closely with him, but not much use from a therapeutic perspective. The interview sessions feed through live to the surveillance room; Steve has watched bits of them. So far they involve involves Dr Medvedev asking questions about the Soldier’s past missions and the Soldier answering them in as much detail as he can. Bucky never spoke a word to Steve about his assassinations after they found each other in Romania; he struggled to even reference them.

The Winter Soldier isn’t boastful, exactly, but it’s obvious that he takes pride in his work. He seems pleased, in his own quiet way, whenever Dr Medvedev steers the conversation towards another of his successful missions. His memory for detail is impressive. He can answer almost any question put to him, though he struggles to start the recall process without Dr Medvedev’s prompting.

He doesn’t seem to mind that his life is being controlled by a group of total strangers, or that he doesn’t know where he’s being held, or even exactly what day it is. Out of everything – the armed guards, the collar, the regimented daily schedule and around-the-clock surveillance – the only thing that seems to worry him is the absence of his metal arm. Steve keeps catching him on the video feed when the doctors aren’t looking, rubbing the stump and gnawing at his lip. At least twice he has tried to pull the covering off so he can pick at the mess of broken plating and torn wires underneath like one big cybernetic scab.

The doctors haven’t offered the Soldier an explanation for what happened to his arm. The Soldier hasn’t asked.

He’s still worrying at it when Steve goes down to the lab after dinner to visit him again. Sitting on his bed, gazing vacantly into space and running his thumb over the edge of his metal shoulder, he doesn’t look like the proud killing machine Steve saw in Dr Medvedev’s interview room. He looks harmless and unsettlingly vulnerable, too small and passive for his heavily fortified cage.

“Does it hurt?” Steve asks. The Soldier looks up. His eyes take a moment to come into focus. “I can get one of the nurses to give you a painkiller.”

It takes the Soldier almost a full minute to reply. “It doesn’t hurt,” he says. The question seems to puzzle him. He watches closely as Steve pulls up a chair in front of the glass and sits down across from him.

He looks so blank that Steve starts to wonder if something has gone wrong with his memory again. “I visited you yesterday evening,” he says. “I told you I’d be back to see you today.”

“I don’t need a refresher.” No change in tone, no change in expression. Steve knows he can do better; he’s watched the interviews. There’s a lot more going on inside the Soldier’s head than he lets on with his guarded persona.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s good. But I can’t know you’re listening if you won’t talk to me.” Steve pulls a chair up in front of the cell and sits down, keeping his posture open and approachable. Every instinct in his body is telling him to close up, to stay on the defensive, never mind the impenetrable glass barrier between them. “I’m just here to talk, that’s all. I’m not asking you for anything else.”

The Soldier considers this. He looks Steve up and down, catching his lip thoughtfully between his teeth. “You’re not one of them,” he says.

_ Them _ could mean a lot of things. Enemies. Commanders. Members of the medical research team.

“No,” says Steve. He holds the Soldier’s gaze, sensing in his gut that to look away now is to fail some sort of test. “I’m one of you.”

The Soldier searches Steve’s face. The haziness has cleared out like morning fog – he’s sharp and astute, coolly analytical, and Steve’s eyes are starting to water under his gaze. And then, all of a sudden, the Soldier looks away.

“I’m hungry,” he says. “You know if there’s any more food coming today?”

Dinner tonight was a huge plate of flatbread and spicy stew, exactly the same as Steve ate. It’s been less than an hour since the Soldier was served. “I can ask if there’s any leftovers in the kitchen,” he offers.

The Soldier nods. His lips move – not a smile, exactly, but it softens the hard planes of his face just a little, and Steve knows that he has passed the test.

It should feel like a victory – the first, with luck, of many to come. But all Steve feels is crawling discomfort. The Soldier is still staring at him and his eyes are  _ wrong _ .

-

“So,” says Sam, voice crackly and muffled down the line. “How’s your pet project going?”

The air outside the facility is so humid it feels like breathing water. Mosquitoes hum loudly as they circle, looking for a chink in Steve’s citronella armour. It’s better than being cooped up indoors. Outside the facility walls, away from the electric lights, the jungle croaks and rustles with life.

“It’s going fine,” says Steve. The line is supposed to be secure, but he’s reluctant to risk going into too much detail. “I don’t think much has changed yet, but it’s hard to tell. He’s still on his guard whenever I try to talk to him.”

Sam makes a noise that sounds very much like a sigh. “Let me guess. You’re paying him visits every day, giving him treats, trying to make him like you.”

_ Treats _ . Why didn’t Steve think of treats? Because it sounds like a dog-training regime, that’s why. But the doctors have made it very clear how important it is to win the Soldier over if they want his treatment to succeed. Locked up in an underground box, sitting patiently still while doctors poke around in his mind, no work or entertainment or variety to take his mind off it all – mealtimes are probably the highlight of the Soldier’s day. “How was your trip home?” he asks instead of answering. “Meet anyone interesting at the airport?”

It’s meant to be a joke, but Sam hesitates to answer. Steve listens intently, and hears him breathing on the other end of the line. “Sam?”

“Actually I took a bit of detour,” says Sam, and Steve’s heart sinks like a stone. “Don’t worry about it, Steve, I can hear you worrying. Everything’s under control. There was some kind of tip off, I don’t know where it came from, but security was tight. I didn’t like my chances of getting through. I just had to go the long way, is all.”

“You should have called me,” says Steve. There were plenty of close calls when they were on the run together, but Steve had assumed Sam would have a better shot at staying under the radar without him. Together, the two of them are a distinctive duo. Separately...well, half of the public know Steve from his appearances on the museum circuit. Fewer of them recognise Sam without his wings on.

“I’ll call you when I need you,” says Sam, not unkindly. “You just keep doing your thing over there. I got my own shit covered.”

Steve swallows. If he asks again, it’ll sound like he doesn’t trust Sam to take care of himself. He won’t be able to explain the pang of unease in his gut, the sense that things have been too easy for too long. The strange, selfish impotence of being out here in the middle of nowhere, too far out of range to be of use if anything does go wrong. Somehow, unbelievably after months of looking over his shoulder, it never occurred to Steve that Sam might have trouble getting back into the US.

“Alright,” says Steve. Sam hasn’t said anything – he probably can’t, on this line – but Steve suspects he’s still outside the US. If Homeland have a reliable tip off that he’s trying to get back into the country, it could be a while before they relax their guard. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“You know it,” says Sam.

Steve lies back on the roof and stares up at the night sky, and forces himself to breathe in deep. He’s only been here a few days. It’s too early to be getting jittery.

-

Every day after lunch, the Soldier’s schedule allocates a four-hour block to his daily reconditioning session. This is Dr Mboye’s area of specialty, the place where the experimental fringe-science nature of her theories really comes to bear. From what Steve has seen so far – and he hasn’t seen much; it’s hard to sit through them for long – the sessions involve hooking the Soldier up to a tangled web of electrodes and showing him a series of hypnotic films depicting the tragedy of physical violence. There are drugs involved, too, though apparently not the mind-altering horrors Steve envisioned when Dr Mboye first briefed him – the Soldier always seems lucid enough when he returns to his cell at six pm for dinner.

Maybe the doctors were right about predictability being key; maybe the Soldier just needed time to get to know his new environment and his new handlers. He has started talking to the doctors, sharing bits and pieces of information unprompted, volunteering the occasional observation or word of feedback on the procedures they run him through. He even talks to the orderlies now, sometimes.

The Soldier seems singularly unconcerned with the gaping holes in his autobiographical memory. He apparently views them as natural – his comment on the first night about only remembering important things was telling, the doctors think. It’s a clever bit of conditioning: if the Soldier believes his forgotten memories are genuinely a waste of his time, then he won’t make any effort to recover them without major provocation. All very convenient for his Hydra handlers.

“I brought you something,” Steve says when he goes down after dinner that night. He has taken Sam’s accidental advice to heart. “Thought you might be hungry again.”

The Soldier eyes Steve suspiciously from his station in front of the TV. “What is it?”

“I found some snacks in the kitchen.” Steve waits at the Soldier’s door, but the Soldier doesn’t move. “Um,” says Steve. “I need you to…”

The Soldier lifts a brow. He still doesn’t move.

“You need to step out of the way,” Steve says. He’s sure the Soldier already knows what Steve wants from him. He does it every day for dinner delivery. “Lab rules.”

The Soldier gets up and crosses to the far corner of the room, raising his hand up over his head. It’s a pointless move – he’s half a dozen paces away, no distance at all if he decides to try and attack Steve through the meal hatch. But the lab staff are insistent about their safety protocols. Steve slides a packet of chocolate chip cookies through the hatch, closes it quickly, checks the lock. The Soldier watches placidly from the corner, and doesn’t move an inch until Steve is back in his seat.

“So,” says Steve. In the silence of the lab, the crackling of foil as the Soldier opens his cookie bag is distractingly loud. “How was your session with Dr Medvedev today?”

The Soldier ignores the question. “There’s this great program,” he says, nodding at the muted TV screen. “They just spent a whole episode building a fucking giant model house, and then at the end they blew it up. I don’t know who the fuck is paying them –”

It strikes Steve as a little foolhardy that the doctors left  _ Mythbusters _ of all things on the Soldier’s heavily censored media whitelist. Then again, the Soldier is already capable of blowing up pretty much anything he likes, with our without Adam Savage’s help.

“Sounds like fun,” says Steve.

The Soldier misses the sarcasm. “Yeah, and now they’re gonna test whether a bullet can really take out an RPG. They obviously haven’t been to Afghanistan.”

“But you have?” asks Steve. That one wasn’t in Karpov’s book, or any of the available records on the Winter Soldier.

“Few years ago, for the Americans,” says the Soldier off-handedly, half his attention already back on the muted TV. Of course. Alexander Pierce didn’t share Vasily Karpov’s diligent journaling habits. There are probably a whole lot of the Soldier’s recent missions that never made it into Hydra’s official records. “Had to neutralise a couple of threats around Kabul.”

Probably best for Steve not to tug on that particular thread. The Soldier stuffs an entire two cookies in his mouth and chews them slowly, cheeks bulging. He props his feet up on the coffee table and leans back on the sofa. Sam was onto something with the treats. The Soldier looks … okay, ‘happy’ is probably too much of a stretch. But he looks relaxed. Comfortable. Contented.

If it weren’t for the glass wall of the cage between them, Steve could almost forget who he’s talking to.

-

The phone rings for so long that Steve nearly hangs up.

“Can’t talk right now, Steve,” says Sam when he finally answers. He sounds out of breath, or maybe it’s a windy day wherever he is. Gusts of air make the receiver crackle unpleasantly in Steve’s ear. “I’m on my way to the pool, thought I’d swim a few laps.”

There’s more than one reason Sam joined the Air Force – he hates swimming. Steve remembers summer days off at Tony’s facility, doing laps in the Olympic pool while Sam sunned himself up on the diving board.  _ So you motherfuckers can’t splash me from down there _ , he’d said, dangling his feet over the side of the platform, fifty feet up above the surface of the water.

Something’s wrong. Sam’s warning Steve that he can’t talk openly.

“You remember your swimsuit?” Steve asks.

“What do I look like?” Sam retorts. “I’m all suited up, don’t you worry about that.” If he’s got his wings, that’s good news – it means he’s probably not in any danger he can’t handle. With his wings on his back Sam can outfly a demigod, forget whatever the government might decide to throw at him. And if Sam were in an actual combat situation, he wouldn’t be answering his phone at all.

He’s being followed, then. He hasn’t managed to lose the tail that picked him up at the airport. Which could mean anything. Hydra. The CIA. Any number of foreign intelligence agencies. They don’t have him yet, but they’re closer than Sam wants them to be.

Steve wishes like anything they could get a secure line. Just for a minute, just long enough to figure out what’s going on.

“Sam,” he says. “If there’s anything I can –”

“You stress too much, Steve. I’m telling you, it’s all good here. I just can’t start a conversation right now.”

“Alright then,” says Steve. “Don’t drown, okay?”

Sam snorts. “I know how to swim.” An awkward silence follows, so long that Steve starts to wonder if the line has dropped off. “It’s my mom’s birthday today,” Sam says. “Might stop by the post office and send her a card.”

Steve’s voice sticks in his throat. “Sam –”

“I gotta go,” Sam says. “Nearly at the pool. We’ll talk when I’ve dried off, alright?”

-

As his treatment progresses, the Soldier’s moods are becoming unpredictable. Sometimes he greets Steve with enthusiasm, and they chat about things they’ve watched and read, or else Steve sets up the chessboard and the Soldier dictates his moves through the glass. The Soldier is terrible at chess. He chases Steve’s king around the board like a bloodhound on the scent and makes no effort to defend any of his own pieces.

He’s also an extremely sore loser. Steve has taken to sabotaging himself on every second game they play just to keep the peace.

Other days, Steve finds the Soldier sullen and mute; he stares blankly at the walls of his cage and ignores all Steve’s efforts to draw him out. Steve can’t tell if the silences are hostile or if the Soldier is just lost in his own head, grappling with his thoughts, oblivious to Steve’s presence in the room. Steve keeps a book with him for those days, and sits outside the glass and reads and tells himself that his company makes a difference.

He tries to remember that it was him who talked Bucky into agreeing to the treatment. It’s because of him that Bucky is like this now, trapped inside the fucked-up mind of a man he went into cryofreeze to escape. A small part of Steve had been hoping it wouldn’t last this long. Bucky broke out of his brainwashing twice before; surely it would be easier now, in a safe place surrounded by friendly doctors and with Steve right there beside him. But if anything the opposite seems to be true. The Soldier is comfortable where he is, so he has no motive to question how he got here. He sees Steve’s face every day, so he never has to wonder why it looks familiar.

And the reconditioning programme is taking its toll. The Soldier isn’t demonstrative – his visible emotional range is still limited to frustrated, indifferent, angry, smug and hungry – but Steve can tell the sessions are draining him. The bags beneath his eyes are getting darker. His skin is oily and colourless, his cheeks dark with days worth of stubble.

Steve tries to feel compassionate. But even on his best behaviour, the Soldier isn’t exactly lovable. His taste in entertainment is as gory as it can be under the strict censorship of his supervising doctors; he’s capable of reading violent totalitarian fantasies into everything from Jane Austen to  _ The Chronicles of Narnia _ . His sense of humour verges on sadistic. His temper is unpredictable – calm one minute, seething the next, and almost never with a visible trigger for his anger. Every so often he loses control and throws his meal tray at the glass, which would be bad enough if he didn’t then spend the rest of the evening loudly complaining of hunger.

And yet every single day Steve visits him, and slides a treat of some kind through his meal hatch, and sits there with him for at least an hour through whatever kind of mood he’s having. If the Soldier has picked up on how little Steve actually likes him, he doesn’t seem to care. He hasn’t even asked Steve’s name in all the time they’ve been talking. Apparently he just enjoys the company for what it is.

Or maybe he’s decided that Steve’s role at the facility is to provide him with nightly entertainment, in much the same way that the orderlies are there to deliver his food through the meal hatch and tidy his cell when he’s not in it. Maybe he hasn’t given the arrangement a moment’s thought. It’s impossible to tell.

Steve makes contact with Sam whenever he can. Some days, Sam doesn’t pick up the phone; other days he gets through, but the line is so bad that they have to give up. The sense of unease is growing, gnawing a pit in Steve’s stomach, made all the worse by the fact that there’s nothing he can actually  _ do _ about it. On days when he gets through, they make small talk for a while about anything they can grab that doesn’t risk tipping off potential listeners to their whereabouts and activities. Books, TV shows, empty gossip – it’s not all that different from the conversations Steve has with the Soldier, except that Sam is less prone to interrupting Steve with nasty comments about who should have killed whom in the latest episode of  _ MasterChef _ .

On days when he doesn’t get through, he goes up to the roof anyway and lies there beneath the stars and the swirling clouds of mosquitoes and pretends the fresh air is doing him some good.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Steve is out here in Wakanda, taking a breather from his life on the run. He must be feeling the stress more than he thought, if a crisis this contained is enough to send him into a tailspin of anxiety.

He and Sam have been dodging the government like this on and off for months now. Somehow, it always felt easier when it was the two of them.

-

It’s 7pm, an hour after dinnertime, and the Soldier isn’t in his cage.

All Steve’s senses go screaming into overdrive as he takes in the empty cell in front of him. The Soldier’s dinner tray is sitting just inside his door, untouched. There’s no sign of a forced exit, or anything out of order in the lab. No sign of damage to the surveillance cameras. One hundred square feet of space and there’s nowhere to hide, no rooms, no cupboards, no –

Oh.

Steve pokes his head into Dr Mboye’s empty office and checks the surveillance feed. The Soldier is in the shower, sitting down under the faucet with his arm wrapped around his knees, low enough that his silhouette doesn’t show through the translucent privacy curtain.

Steve takes a deep, calming breath. Of course. If the Soldier had gotten loose somehow, there would have been an alarm. Maybe this is progress. The Soldier usually never showers unless someone explicitly tells him to.

Steve opens the meal hatch and adds his offering of cheese crackers and candied nuts to the pile of food inside the door. In a way it’s a relief that the Soldier isn’t waiting to talk to him today. His mood has been deteriorating as the intensity of his sessions picks up. His old sullen silences are nothing on the campaigns of snapping and snarling and underhanded insults he’s taken to waging on Steve after a difficult day in therapy. Steve doesn’t take any of it personally, because Steve is a stable adult with robust self-esteem and the Soldier is a brainwashed killer trapped inside a hundred square foot prison cell with nowhere else to vent his feelings. But it gets tiring after a while.

He props his feet up against the glass and pulls out his novel. Hopefully by the time the Soldier emerges the adrenaline rush will have worn off and Steve won’t be on edge with him. If today is anything like yesterday, he’s going to need his patience.

But the minutes tick by, and Steve’s heart rate slows back down to normal, and still the Soldier doesn’t come out. Steve checks the monitor again; the Soldier hasn’t moved a muscle. He’s just sitting there, water pouring off his back, staring at the tiled wall with a vacant expression.

Something’s not right. Steve reaches for Dr Mboye’s desk phone and calls the surveillance room. “How long has he been in the shower?” he asks.

A pause while the staff on the other end confer. “He went in before his meal was delivered,” says the supervisor.

More than an hour ago. Has the Soldier been in there all this time? “And you didn’t think that was weird?” Steve says.

“Captain, a great many things about our patient are weird. Provided his behaviour is not aggressive, we allow him to do as he likes in his free time.”

“Just get the doctors down here,” Steve says. There will be plenty of time later to argue supervision policy on the Soldier’s downtime.

He goes back to the door and peers through the glass. Now that he knows it’s there, he can just make out the Soldier’s silhouette, a motionless shadow low behind the shower curtain. He raps on the glass: no movement. “Soldat,” he calls. Nothing.

Dr Medvedev appears in the stairwell, brows furrowed. He taps the glass, tries calling out like Steve did; he surveys the security footage and then tries again. There’s no doubt about it, now – something is definitely wrong. Ignoring Steve is one thing, but the Soldier never deliberately ignores an instruction from anyone he sees as an authority figure.

“Maybe he can’t hear us above the water,” Dr Medvedev suggests.

“He hates showers,” says Steve. “He’s been in there way too long.”

Dr Medvedev purses his lips. “We can cut off the water supply,” he says.

But the Soldier still doesn’t react when the shower goes dry. He doesn’t move doesn’t even look up – it’s like he’s gone completely catatonic. Steve takes a moment to weigh up his options. This isn’t necessarily an emergency; he’s seen the Soldier zone out before. Maybe not to this extent, but a lot of things are bound to change as the Soldier gets further into the reconditioning process. He’ll probably snap out of the episode given time.

Steve checks the surveillance feed again. When he looks at the screen closely, the Soldier’s lips have a strange blueish tinge.

“Alright,” Steve says. “I’m going in there.”

The Soldier’s cell doesn’t get opened between 6pm and 6am. When he is moved between the cell and the other lab rooms, at very specific times of the day, he’s escorted by four armed guards and overseen by a surveillance staffer with his finger on the button ready to activate the Soldier’s collar. Those are the rules.

Steve’s not going to think about the million different ways things could go wrong if he breaks them. His chances are better than any of the guards who usually work the escort shift. The Soldier is dangerous, he’s unstable, he’s unlikeable, sure – but he’s also unwell, and under a lot of stress with the experimental treatments being run on his mind. They can’t just leave him there to drip-dry in dissociative misery.

Steve’s veins are singing with adrenaline as he crosses the threshold. Dr Medvedev refuses to lock the door behind him; from a tactical standpoint it’s a stupid decision, but Steve is grateful. The cell is small, and smaller from the inside than it looks on the outside – barely four paces across the floor to the shower cubicle.

Steve pulls back the curtain. The Soldier doesn’t so much as twitch; wherever he is in his head, it’s a long way away from here. “Soldat,” says Steve, and crouches down beside him. His lips really are blue, and his skin is sickly white. There’s no trace of steam in the air – he’s been sitting under an ice cold water jet for god knows how long.

When Steve drapes a towel around his shoulders, finally the Soldier stirs. He looks at Steve, blinking sluggishly, droplets of water clinging to his lashes. Last time the two of them were this close, the Soldier had a hand around Steve’s throat. But he doesn’t try anything now. There’s no anger in his eyes; he looks lost, disoriented, and Steve’s heart leaps into his throat. He reaches out to rest his hand on an icy shoulder and it’s not the Soldier he’s touching, those aren’t the Soldier’s eyes, this is …

He’s getting ahead of himself. There are protocols for this, too, if Bucky starts regaining his memories. The doctors have protocols for everything. But Steve can’t remember them right now. He’s looking into the bleary eyes of his best friend and there’s not a trace of scorn or hatred in them.

The Soldier – Bucky? – reaches up to pull the towel around himself. He shakes his head, and drops of water splash Steve’s face. “It’s cold,” he says.

“Well,” says Steve, as gently as he can. “You’ve been under that faucet for a while.” Bucky looks up, and blinks again. He seems surprised to find himself in the shower.

“What was I –?”

“Let’s get you dry,” says Steve. “You’re chilled to the bone, come on.”

Bucky comes to himself a little when Steve helps him to his feet. Mechanical, stiff from cold, he dries himself off and pulls on clean sweatpants and a t-shirt. Steve keeps a hand on his back and guides him to the couch. They knew it was only a matter of time until Bucky shook off the brainwashing, without Hydra’s brutal methods to keep him in check. The doctors aren’t going to be happy. They’re probably going to insist on retriggering him soon so the programme can continue. But privately, Steve is glad to see the end of the Soldier for a while. It’s not the Soldier’s fault that he is the way he is. But it’s all wrong, seeing him walk around the place in Bucky’s body, using Bucky’s voice and ignoring everything that makes Bucky who he is.

Steve sits down by Bucky’s side, and Bucky leans into Steve, resting his head on Steve’s shoulder. He’s still icy to the touch. “How long was I out?” he asks, vocal chords creaky with cold.

Steve wraps an arm around him, lending him warmth. “It’s been a couple of weeks,” he says.

Bucky pulls back. He scrunches his face up, breath worryingly cool on Steve’s face. “I’ve been in the shower for a couple of weeks?”

“No, you’ve been …” Steve trails off. His heart sinks back down, skipping his chest and heading straight for his stomach. Fucking stupid. He just assumed – he didn’t check. “Do you know me?” he asks, not sure he wants to hear the answer.

Bucky – not Bucky, the Soldier, Steve thought by now he would know the difference – chews his lip. “Sure,” he says, and it’s a sign of how confused he still is that the question doesn’t annoy him. “You’re here every day. You bring snacks.”

There’s movement outside the cell. Dr Medvedev has summoned the guard detail; they’re standing at the ready by the door, high-powered stun batons hanging from their belts. The surveillance team will be on standby too. Steve’s fine, there’s no risk, the whole thing is still under control; nothing is bruised except his optimism. Very carefully, he removes his arm from around the Soldier’s shoulders and puts some healthy space between them. The Soldier’s dripping hair has left a cold wet patch on Steve’s shirt.

He should fetch a blanket from the bed, maybe get maintenance to turn up the central heating while the Soldier warms back up. All he wants is to get out of the cell, away from the shivering, miserable man who isn’t who Steve hoped he was, after all.

But when he tries to rise from the couch, the Soldier’s hand shoots out to catch his wrist. “Captain,” Dr Medvedev barks. The guards have their hands on their stun batons.

“Wait,” Steve tells them. The Soldier’s fingers are trembling on his arm and fuck everything, Steve still hopes. “Focus, Soldat. What do you remember?”

The Soldier’s eyes search Steve’s face. “I know you,” he says.

“Captain,” Dr Medvedev calls again.

Steve places a hand over the Soldier’s and squeezes it.  _ Come on _ . “Keep going,” he says. He can see it in the Soldier’s eyes, can see the pieces of his world shifting, rearranging themselves.

“You were on the helicarrier,” the Soldier says. His grip on Steve’s wrist tightens. “The Secretary told me ...” He breaks off, eyes coming into sharp focus as they zero in on Steve’s face. “Who the fuck are you?”

He’s remembering. Steve’s done this with him before, he knows how it goes. Everything the Soldier knows about the world tells him Steve is an enemy. This is the part that has to come first, before the rest of the memories start coming back. “My name’s Steve,” he says, and keeps his voice steady and full of authority. “I’m your friend.”

He holds the Soldier’s gaze, gripping his hand, willing him to remember. They can do this. They’re right on the edge, they’ve done this before, they can –

Stars explode behind Steve’s eyes. He’s on the ground with the Soldier on top of him, his ears are ringing and all he can say is “Wait! Let him –”

“You should have gone down with the helicarriers,” the Soldier snarls, close in Steve’s ear. “You piece of shit, all this time you’ve been –”

The collar goes off. The Soldier slumps, eyes wide with shock, and then the guards are hauling his limp body away and Dr Medvedev is helping Steve to his feet.

“You okay?” he asks.

Steve’s voice has died in his throat. He watches, numb, as the guards drag the Soldier’s dead weight over to the bed.

-

“How much longer will he be out?”

“He is not out,” says Dr Mboye. “Just paralysed. I expect he is using the downtime to reflect on his actions.”

This seems optimistic, but then, Dr Mboye and her team are clearly on top of what they’re doing with the Soldier. Their reaction to his outburst was almost instantaneous. Off in one corner a group of nurses are already reviewing the footage, taking notes and scanning for clues. Dr Medvedev is standing by for a debrief once the Soldier regains motor function. Dr Mboye sits Steve down in her office and pours them both a pot of peppermint tea.

“Please do not consider this a setback, Captain Rogers,” she urges him. Her eyes are bright with a scientific fervour that Steve knows all too well from years of dealing with Tony. “I believe today’s episode is a sign that our treatments are beginning to penetrate the Winter Soldier’s psychological defences. We are reshaping his inner landscape, and the stress on his mind is considerable. It was only ever a matter of time before he acted out.”

Steve sips his tea without registering the taste. “He remembers the helicarriers,” he says. “He knows who I am now, and all he can remember is trying to kill me.”

Dr Mboye makes a noise in her throat that Steve assumes is meant to resemble sympathy. “His programming is holding strong. That suits our purposes for the time being. When it is time to bring Bucky back to himself, we can –”

“You can what?” says Steve flatly. His head aches, and he can feel swelling on the back of his skull where the Soldier slammed it into the floor. “Because as far as I can see, whatever you’re doing to him is just making Hydra’s brainwashing stronger.” A horrible thought strikes him. “Which is exactly what you want, isn’t it? You’re doing something to suppress his memory of who he is.”

Dr Mboye’s lips pull thin. “I have been open with you since the beginning, Captain. My method relies upon the Winter Soldier remaining in his programmed state. All of us have taken steps to ensure that he is not made aware of his other self.”

Steve’s headache throbs behind his eyes. Nausea wells up, and he passes a hand over his eyes to steady himself. “We’ve tried to avoid triggering his memory,” he says. “But you’re doing something else. You’re messing with his brain, just like Hydra did.”

“A daily half-hour of hypnosis,” Dr Mboye says evenly. “Gentle, non-violent reinforcement of his active identity. I am helping the programming do what it already does, and preventing a great deal of distress and cognitive dissonance as the reconditioning takes hold.”

“Bucky never agreed to –”

“He most certainly did, Captain Rogers. What did you think were his intentions when he agreed for us to retrigger him?” Steve remembers sitting with Bucky in the lab when all this started, watching this face crumple with helpless resignation as the doctors began the reprogramming.  _ Zhelanie. Rzhavvy. Semnadtsat _ – “Do you think he would prefer it if we allowed the brainwashing to slip, and were forced to trigger him over again?”

“But …” Steve wants so badly to be angry. To feel betrayed. To have anyone he can blame for what just happened in Bucky’s cell.

“Captain Rogers,” Dr Mboye says. “I apologise for your disappointment. Your friend is the first such case I have ever treated, but I do not believe he will be the last. With the rise of superpowered combatants on the global battlefield, mind control will become for many a more attractive prospect than ever. I believe that his case is a matter of urgent concern for the medical community. So I do not regret prioritising my research goals and the long-term success of the treatment over your emotional comfort.”

Steve lets out a long, slow breath. He wants to shout at Dr Mboye, to leap to his feet, to say something powerful and vindicating that reminds him of what he truly stands for and brings the situation back under control. He comes up blank. “I just,” he says. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

Dr Mboye makes her sympathetic noise again. This time, she sounds like she might really mean it. “Things will only get harder from here, I am afraid. Our plan of concealing from the Winter Soldier the true nature of our work with him is no longer viable. Now that he recognises you as an enemy, he will start to mistrust the rest of us. He will realise he is no longer with Hydra, at which point I expect he will begin to resist our treatment in earnest.”

Steve looks up at the surveillance monitor. The Soldier is starting to regain motor function; he twitches on the bed, prising his eyelids open to stare straight up at the camera. His eyes are dark pools of hatred.

-

“I’m sorry to call you so late,” says Steve down the crackling line. He’s not sure what timezone Sam is in; he’s too exhausted to picture it being daylight anywhere in the world right now. “I didn’t know what else to do. Things have gotten messed up here.”

He hears Sam suck in a sharp breath. “You alright? He didn’t hurt –”

“No, I’m fine,” says Steve quickly. “Everyone’s fine. He’s in his cell, the collar works fine, he’s not going anywhere.”

“Okay then.” Sam exhales, and Steve can’t see him but he can hear that he’s drawing himself up for something. “I’m sorry, Steve,” Sam says, “but if everyone at the facility’s safe, I need you to put the rest aside for a minute. Things have gotten messed up here too.”

-

The Soldier sleeps on his stomach, arm tucked beneath his pillow, one bare foot hanging out over the side of the bed. It’s past dawn, and the first rest he’s had since the paralysis wore off. He’s been awake for hours, hurling himself against the glass of his cell, upending anything that isn’t bolted down, snarling threats at anyone who passes through the lab.

The room around him is trashed. But in the middle of the wreckage, the Soldier looks deceptively peaceful.

On a spare screen in the lab, quiet enough not to sound through the glass, Steve’s got the news playing. As far as he can piece together, it all happened with the best of intentions: Clint and Wanda were trying to get to Sam in Rome, where he was hiding out after losing the government tail that tracked him to the airport. Somewhere along the line, they got made by local security forces. The JCTC stepped in, guns blazing. One of their agents has ended up on life support. Fresh warrants have been issued for the arrest of Wanda Maximoff and anyone connected with her. Watching the story unfold on CNN gives Steve a sick sense of deja vu.

They’re due to fly in within the hour. The extraction went off without a hitch; the plane that lifted the three of them out was unmarked and cloaked with the very best of Wakanda’s stealth technology. If anyone pieces together that the Wakandans are helping the Avengers, it’s going to mean a full-scale war.

And all of it will be on Steve. He’s the one who brought Sam out of the US and onto the global security radar. He’s the one who stayed behind when Sam went back out, the one who chose to accept that Sam would be fine when his gut instinct was telling him that he wouldn’t, the one who’s been so wrapped up in his own fucked-up psychodrama with the Winter Soldier that he didn’t notice the whole world falling down around everyone else’s ears. He’s the one who called T’Challa for help – again – because he couldn’t get there himself on time. The Wakandan team wouldn’t even let Steve work the extraction with them. His presence, they told Steve politely, risked escalating the conflict further. They were better equipped to handle it themselves.

The Soldier twitches in his sleep. He’ll probably start coming around again soon. Steve’s not sure how he managed to fall asleep at all, with all that violent rage running through him. Maybe the doctors added a sedative to the air in his cell. It doesn’t matter; Steve’s too exhausted to care.

He dims the lights when he leaves the lab. The longer the Soldier stays out, the better for everyone.


End file.
